1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to marketing management software. More specifically, the field of the invention is that of enterprise software for coordinating campaign management and workflow.
2. Description of the Related Art
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not teachings or suggestions of the prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Campaign Management applications have existed in some form for years starting with mainframe list selection, moving on to client server applications, and now web-based applications. Campaign Management applications segment customers or prospects using an underlying marketing database with contact information as well as demographics, firmographics, product interest, purchases, web history, etc. The campaign management application also designs messages and offers for each group and outputs this list for use in marketing promotions across any channel—direct mail, email, web, call center, and so on.
Campaign Management systems access an underlying relational database system or set of files that hold customer and marketing data in order to perform segmentation of the customers or prospects for use in marketing programs. These individual segmentations are then stored in the database or in a file consisting or keys or keys and data. These files are used to create list output and tagged with specific offer and tracking codes for marketing tracking purposes.
Campaign Management applications use a variety of segmentation tools including group selection, exclude and merge, sort and splitting, model scoring, output, and other specialized tools. These tools create and manipulate the marketing files and their underlying data elements. The data elements being a key identifying a customer, household, account, or other marketing unit.